THE
BONES OF BERDICHEV

The Life and
Fate of Vasily Grossman

by John Gordon Garrard and Carol
Garrard

(Courtesy: "AMAZON")

From
Publishers Weekly

Legendary WWII Soviet correspondent Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) covered the
battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and advanced westward with the Red Army in
its drive to Berlin. As he moved across liberated Soviet territory, he came
upon the mass graves of Soviet Jews exterminated by the Germans. His accounts
of these discoveries as well as of Treblinka and Majdanek made him the first
journalist to chronicle the Holocaust, note the authors. The event that caused
him to confront his Jewishness was learning that one of the 20,000 Jews annihilated
at Berdichev, where Grossman was born, was his mother. The authors (Inside
the Soviet Writer's Union) use mainly newly available archival material to
show that the Holocaust actually began in the Soviet Union, before the death
camps of Poland; that the German Wehrmacht was complicitous in the war against
the Jews; that collaboration by the Ukrainians with the Germans against the
Jews was widespread. This impassioned, meticulously researched story also
tells of Grossman's failure to publish his fiction accounts (e.g., Life and
Fate) of the war years. The authors break new ground in showing how a single
Soviet Jewish journalist came to show the similarity between the totalitarian
Nazi and Soviet states.

From Booklist

Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman's modest reputation in the West is due
to the fact that toward the end of his life (1905^-64), he was effectively
transformed into a nonperson by nervous Soviet authorities, and his major
works were suppressed. No mere observer, Grossman participated in the most
terrible events of this century: World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalin's
reign of terror. He spent more than 1,000 days with the Red Army at the front
during its struggle against the Germans from 1941 to 1945. It was Grossman
who first documented the Holocaust, publishing accounts as early as 1943.
Grossman's role as a patriot changed after the massacre of 30,000 Jews in
his hometown of Berdichev in 1941 by the Nazis with the help of Ukrainian
soldiers. His mother was one of the victims. Grossman's account of Soviet
complicity in the extermination of Russia's Jews was hidden by the Communist
Party for almost 50 years. The Garrards' revealing biography is based primarily
on archival and unpublished sources that have become available only since
the collapse of the Soviet regime. Grossman witnessed firsthand much of this
century's cruelty and evil; the Garrards have given this nonperson a new life. George
Cohen